Moreover, the crumbs are stored in the largely unreliable data device located at the top end of my neck.
But if I were offered cash to disclose sensitive information about you it would be related to a column I wrote last year when I visited family on the north side of Chicago.
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It was about a visit with mother to a bra department of a national brick-and-mortar retailer - a column about which many of you took a deeper and more abiding interest in than I anticipated.
I’m not judging here.
I’m just sayin’ … a lot of you talked with me about it.
So, I thought you might be interested in my latest, although brief incursion with my mother into bra-la land.
It was a brief for the simplest of reasons: There was no special sale as there had been a year ago.
As a result, I did not suffer the humiliation of my previous visit when I found myself on my knees with my face in the midst of the load-bearing portions of the bras searching for the right size and model to reap the 2-for-1 discount.
I admit that on this most recent visit, a passerby might have misinterpreted the reason for which I was pawing at the bra for an inordinate amount of time.
In truth it represented nothing to raise the ire of the Me-Too movement nor any other hashtag-related entity. I was merely focused on finding the one tag among what seemed to be about a dozen that identified where the garment was made.
The answer involved a country that, in my youth, was as divided as any bra ever was, Vietnam. An obvious clue to that appeared when I saw Asian language characters on the tags as I was shuffling through them.
And, appropriately enough, I found the tag I was looking for in the center back, right where the demilitarized zone once was.
The label was the last important bit of data I collected on a morning when I came to fully appreciate the kind of international business my mother conducts in her early 90s.
Minutes earlier, as I had tried to help her find the right size and style tops, I noticed the variety of countries in which they were made: Indonesia and Bangladesh; The Philippines and Guatemala; Nicaragua, India and, of course, China.
Most of these garments were found in close proximity to the geographic location that is ground-zero on most of my shopping trips with Mom: the clearance rack.
As it turned out, international trade was not the only current event I came across on my visit.
So was immigration.
On the first day of my visit, my mother brought out a couple of bags of things, including a photo I don’t recall having seen of my beloved Grandpa Salli.
Taken in 1899, likely on the day of his baptism, it’s a formal photo showing his mother and father and three brothers along with my grandfather, whose face is all that can be seen inside of a long, white christening gown.
My great-grandfather had left Finland seven years before to work as an indentured servant in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. For those years, he sent money home while the family saved for a move to the United States, where my grandfather was born.
The picture framed my understanding of another shopping trip with Mom on my latest visit.
Having humped to the opposite end of the store to visit a bathroom, my mother, pushing a walker, and I returned to a bench in the shoe department in a TJ Maxx. We needed a rest before returning to the racks.
Moments after we left the bench, I sat down next to an older woman trying on what I made out in Spanish were size six shoes and made a suggestion: That I try on her size 6s and she try on my 13s.
Not an English speaker, she wondered not only why the loco gringo sat down but was making such a suggestion.
Her perhaps 11-year-old grandson smiled at the joke, then translated. Although his mother smiled at the translation, the remarks did not seem to alter his grandmother’s judgment about the loco gringo.
But as I watched the younger two generations of the family dote and wait on the third, it struck me how much their experience had in common with one my mother lived, growing up bi-lingual in the U.P.
Mom put a cherry on top of this connection by telling me a story I’d never heard.
When World War II started, a teacher shortage in the U.P. required schools to consolidate. So, my Mom and her classmates from rural Covington Twp. began taking hour-long bus rides to L’Anse for classes.
There, they were greeted by two boys who told them that “dumb Finns” had to sit over by the Indians in the cafeteria.
It was a story her family repeated when my mother - whom a middle school teacher gave a copy of “Gone with the Wind” to read when she finished her school work ahead of the other children - was honored as her high school’s valedictorian.
Maybe that’s why I enjoy my trips to bra-la land with a 91-year-old “dumb Finn” - and why I thought that you, my readers, would want me to report back.
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